Subject:  Viridian Note 00025

Key concepts:  energy policy, German Greens, Munich 
futurism, Soviet nuclear plants

Attention Conservation Notice:  It's about German 
politics. It might use terms such as "Forschungsgruppe 
Zukunftsfragen."

Links:  http://www.gruene.de/

Entries in the "Big Mike" Viridian Design Contest:
http://www.pinknoiz.com/viridian/logos.html
http://www.spaceways.de/BigMike/Mike.html
http://weber.u.washington.edu/~r1ddl3r/bigmike.html
http://powerbase-alpha.com/bigmike
http://rampages.onramp.net/~jzero/
http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades
http://www.57thstreet.com/viridian/
http://www.ioc.net/~bini/bigmike.htm
http://www.pcnet.com/~thallad/mike.htm
http://www.golden.net/~eli/viridian/
http://ucsub.colorado.edu/~smcginni/big-mike/big-mike.html
and
http://www.karmanaut.com/viridian/big.mike/
Attention warning:  3D "Big Mike" animation may confuse some browsers.

From: hoechst.forum@lrz.uni-muenchen.de* (Doug Merrill)

Doug Merrill remarks:

    How Viridian are the German Greens?

    The short answer is, unfortunately, not very.

    The German Greens, while certainly enjoying a taste of 
power, and providing Europe with its only interesting 
foreign minister, are coming face to face with real power, 
as your remarks on the non-phaseout of Swedish nuclear 
plants point out (Note 00020). So far, real power is 
winning.

    Real power is winning in some cases because it 
represents responsibility, common sense and the will of 
the people. Example: keeping Germany in NATO. 

    Real power also wins where it merely represents common 
sense and the will of the people. Example: not making 
gasoline in Germany cost three times as much as any other 
country in Europe. 

    And in some cases, real power is winning from the will 
of the people alone. Example: no speed limits on the 
autobahn.

     One of the reasons that the Greens are not very 
Viridian is that large chunks of them are still quite 
technophobic. At the grass roots level, many German Greens 
believe that technology is inherently dehumanizing, and 
they pretend that they can just say 'nein danke' to the 
whole thing.

    Greens are good at picket signs, and they're getting 
better at parliaments, but they're not going to invent 
anything that changes the world. Furthermore, after so 
many years in opposition, they're much better at stopping 
things than advancing them. A Viridian era needs more.

    There are, however, some good signs. The Greens are 
showing more discipline than their industrial-era 
coalition partners. The Greens are willing to take on 
sacred cows. And the Greens are showing more signs of 
learning than the other parties. All of these traits give 
them Viridian potential.

    At the level of specific policies, however, expect 
progress to be slow. Changing a third of Germany's energy 
sources in eight years is ambitious, headline-grabbing, 
and almost certainly impossible. This is a country that 
took the better part of ten years to extend permissible 
shopping hours by ninety minutes.  Germany has just 
significantly modified its citizenship laws for the first 
time since a Kaiser ruled in Berlin. Besides, the only 
thing Germany would replace nuclear power with right now 
is more carbon-based fuel. (It's one thing for the Swedes 
to buy wind power from the Danes; it's quite another 
trying to run the world's third largest economy on 
windmills.) 

     Another test of Green strength would be phasing out 
subsidies to coal miners. German taxpayers support a tidy 
living for German miners, paying lots of marks to keep up 
an industry that's both loss-making and polluting. But 
miners are heroes to social democrats, so the Greens 
probably lose this one as well.

     Germany will probably introduce some form of 'eco-
tax' this coming year, probably a consumption tax on fuels 
somewhat like the BTU tax that died such a painful death 
in the US. An eco-tax has become fashionable in the very 
German duty- and guilt-ridden sense. It's not attractive, 
it's simply understood in the orthodoxy that this is 
something you have to do. This may be politically 
effective, but I find it unappealing. (I'm also already 
paying 45% taxes on a researcher's salary, so the notion 
of any further taxation offends me terribly.) Guilt 
doesn't strike me as very Viridian.

     Those are the key points. I'll see if I can get a 
digital picture of Munich Re for you, to go along with 
those sexy articles on insurance.

best,

Doug Merrill

Research Group on the Global Future
Center for Applied Policy Research
University of Munich
hoechst.forum@lrz.uni-muenchen.de

Bruce Sterling remarks:

    How very useful and interesting.  Thank you very much.

   Now, for further insight on the European energy policy 
scene, we quote a recent installment of the column "Europe 
This Week" by veteran British journalist Martin Walker.

Source:  Manchester Guardian Weekly. November 29, 1998, 
page 6.

    "To begin with the horror stories: the $900 million 
earmarked by the EU for repairing and making safe the 
nuclear power plants of the old Soviet Bloc has been 
either wasted, lost, defrauded or left unspent.  'It is 
particularly worrying that, at the end of 1997, it was not 
possible to judge whether there had been any actual 
progress in terms of nuclear safety,' Bernhard Friedmann, 
president of the Court of Auditors, told the European 
Parliament.

    "The nuclear scandal was simply the most chilling of a 
series of accounting disasters and bungles afflicting 
every aspect of Europe's finances.  It was also the most 
shaming, because the EU sought and won the agreement of 
the Group of Seven leading industrial nations to manage 
the international community's rescue efforts for the 65 
sick and dangerous Soviet nuclear power plants.  Trusted 
by its allies and Russians alike, the EU bungled the job."